Cania

Cania lies in the Torbes valley, within the mountain passage of Tachira that breaks the Andean highlands. Indigenous villages and cultivated ground occupied the valley before Spanish settlers arrived from Pamplona. Here the routes towards Merida crossed country cut by rivers and overlooked by mountain slopes. The Spaniards called the valley Santiago, and the settlement they founded there served travellers moving between the towns of the New Kingdom of Granada and the eastern Andes.

In 1561, Juan Maldonado established San Cristobal at the indigenous settlement known to the Spaniards as Las Auyamas. Resistance from surrounding communities forced the settlers to protect their town with an earthen fort. San Cristobal nevertheless remained closely tied to its fields: in 1644, only one house was built of brick and roofed with tiles, while the others had wattle-and-daub walls and thatch. Even the town's officials spent much of their time on nearby farms, returning to the settlement on Sundays.